Dawson's opponents, not Dawson, had special concern about SBE patients in September 1940

Pity the poor historian ( like me !) trying to recover the substance of the visual glances,the brief shoulder shrugs,  the sotto voce verbal hints and half finished sentences, all very typical of conversation within small cliques in a small staff room, when the group is divided up into various opposing factions of colleagues, who must still at least pretend to get along at work.

I believe that in September 1940, upon his return to medical school and hospital, Dr Martin Henry Dawson half overheard some conversations between members of a group of his colleagues who not well disposed to social medicine, even in peacetime.

The Fall of France had happened and many Americans believed the Fall of Britain was soon to follow.

The American medical elite, made up mostly of  conservatives not in favour of medical intervention towards the weak at home or abroad, were now all claiming to be preparing for a possible war.

Maybe they were - in part.

But for many of them, talk of war preparation allowed them to reduce the alarming amount of social medicine (treating the poor dying like the rich dying) being practised.

They insisted they were only seeking to reduce medical intervention among the domestic weak and small because all existing resources (and more) were needed for possible future medical intervention in support of Europe's weak and small nations.

Reducing domestic comfort and aid because of possible foreign intervention ---- which they were still strongly opposed to !

I call that classic 'Bad Faith' and template Orwellian Double Talk.

I think it was these colleagues who mentioned the SBE patients as the classic sort of 'bed waster' that a war medicine hospital could no longer afford.

We know there was already some existing consensus on ignoring the SBEs under war conditions because there was almost no resistance from doctors in America in the Fall of 1942, when the disease was declared by the NAS 'death panels' to be of no military value and so denied penicillin - the only medicine that could save its patients' lives.

This censenus was also found among doctors in Canada, the Uk and Australia as the NAS ban on the use of wartime penicillin for dying SBE patients was extended by the medical establishment in those countries again without almost any controversy.

But Dawson himself had never before spoken or written or researched on SBE and its patients.

His sudden concern in September 1940 to make the 4F SBEs the focus of his wartime natural penicillin crusade, I believe, came from him half overhearing his conservative colleagues dismissing them as worthy of equal treatment to the war wounded 1As.

Dawson's empathy for the unjustly neglected simply kicked in ....

A bad faith Charter 'written on the water', just off Newfoundland

All of India knew very well the saying that when you make a promise you don't intend ever to keep, you say you 'wrote it on the water'.

Since Winston Churchill had no intention of keeping the promises of self determination found in the Atlantic Charter he had signed with FDR in August 1941, the fact that this Charter was literally 'written on the water' off Argentina Newfoundland was a telling, even poetic, lapse in British spin-doctoring....

The Bad News war is really the Bad Faith war, more accurate but less catchy

Calling the new Halifax ferry "The William J Roue" might pass muster with the world class nervous nellies that make up the local elite.

But, hopefully, ordinary citizens - the young particularly - will simply come to say that "I'm taking the roue to Dartmouth", just as the young took to simply calling the Canadian Dollar "the loonie".

Because a catchy name trumps a more accurate (but more awkward) name almost every time.

I really wanted to sub-title my book "a Good News story from the bad faith war" but that sounds like something that would only appeal to philosophers.

But as yesterday's blog post explained, my view is that WWII was a really bad news war, not simply because of its tens of millions of deaths, but because it was also one of history's most perfidious wars.

 On all sides : Axis, Neutral and Allied.

A low, dishonest decade fallowed by a low, dishonest war.

WWII's really bad news was the tremendous amounts of bad faith floating about in the general moral atmosphere.....

WWII caused by Bad Faith Scientists preferring "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" to "TRUTH,TRUTH,TRUTH"

   After 1895, as it gradually became apparent across the entire width of the science and mathematics that Newtonian mechanics was   perhaps not the metaphor for the way that Reality worked, individually and collectively scientists faced their biggest ever dilemma.

   Up to 1895, the sort of science (Popular Science) that was taught in high schools and to undergraduates and was simplified-down whenever eminent scientists talked to the popular press, at least was the same as all scientists believed it was, whenever they wrote about it in peer-reviewed articles in the best regarded science journals.
   (Best be aware that 'peer-reviewed' is a metaphor or a sort of shorthand for reliably-regarded science articles, because in fact, formal peer-review in today's sense of the term was actually quite rare until after 1945.
    It was still 'peer-reviewed' before publishing but in a highly informal style - the peer might be the editor and his closest friend with some specialist knowledge in the particular area the paper dealt with.)
   There was no moral divide between Published and Popular Science.
   Unfortunately after 1895, this happy unity was torn apart and has never been re-sutured.
   It was choice made made the scientists themselves.
   They were just then (this is more than a hundred years ago, mind you) entertaining strong hopes they could do basic science full time and be both well paid (including tenure and pensions) and well  respected for doing so.
   Crucially, these would be jobs in other people's employ - they would be well paid well regarded employees - not self-employed entrepreneurs.
  They were thus dependent highly on public good will.
  
 
  
  
  

NAS tipped to run American AUSCHWITZ after Nazi conquest ???

Organized Science, if it knows nothing else (a claim easy to defend), sure knows how to sing for its supper.

That is why Scientism is our one and only God.

Organized Science knows just when to switch sides and to start sucking up to the newest powerful entities in town and it knows just who is powerless enough to safely kick in the teeth.

It also picks its opponents it chooses to publicly battle very carefully so that none of the resulting mud sticks to its priestly skirts.

The NAS choose not to criticize Raymond Loewy's ROCKETPORT vision at the New York's World Fair of 1939-1940----- and silence is assent.

The Rocketport was the most scientifically loony idea at a Fair replete with scientifically loony ideas.

The so called 'Rocket' , a small ocean liner in size, was actually a cannon projectile fired in New York and designed to land in Paris  ------- somehow without the resulting enormous G-Forces mushing everybody inside the projectile into protoplasm.

(Humans might survive 200 Gs all over their body, if its only for a fraction of a second as in a car crash, but this voyage would impose at least 20,000 Gs for a fatally long time, even if we ignore the peak force of about 200,000 Gs at blast-off......)

Loewy got away with his loony tune idea because he claimed it came to him from studying scientific journals (rather than saying he saw it in a vision after praying to the Virgin Mary).

Whether the idea came from the Journal SCIENCE or MATTHEW 12 in the Bible, the idea was equally crazy.

But rest assured that the NAS would only have rushed forward to condemn it as scientifically invalid if the idea  had come from their bete noires in the camp of the dreaded 'Religion'.

The All-American idea of applied negative Eugenics (can you say Auschwitz, boys and girls ?) was a much more damaging loony idea the NAS choose not to publicly attack - until it was far far too late and after eugenics had been already discredited by the march of events in Eastern Europe.

That is what I mean by Science's Bad Faith --- its unwillingness to attack anything as unscientific, no matter how loony or deadly, if doing so risks lowering the awesome respect ordinary people still have for those 'wonder-working wizards' of science.

In the end, it all comes down to "JOBS,JOBS,JOBS" as that famous scientist Brian Mulroney once observed ---- he also said "there is no whore like an old whore".

True, so true.....